Horse got drunk so he could tell him, with great sadness, “My boy, you could have been number one, but you’re crazy. We missed the train, and there won’t be another. I’m old now. I’m going to Chañaral to the house where I was born. I’m going to plant tomatoes, because they’ll remind me of boxing gloves. Good-bye.”
It took Jaime three months to recover from the beating. When he left the hospital, he found out that Horse had given up the room in the tenement, so he’d have to find a new one. He went to the apartment of Teresa and Benjamín to see if they’d let him stay there for a while.
It was December 1919. The heat was unbearable, but all the shops were decorated with snow, sleds, and Santa Clauses dressed for a polar cold. In that ridiculous festive setting imported from the European winter so it could be transplanted in the heart of summer, the evil surprises continued. Now it was Teresa’s turn. Simply put, she went insane.
Where did she get the rifle? No one ever found out. She stepped out onto the balcony and began shooting. Luckily, her rage was attenuated by a rejection of death; she only wanted to wound people in the legs, as she expressed it screaming amid the firing, in order to keep her victims from marching in repugnant flocks. The hatred that seized her was directed at all uniforms. She would shoot and shout, “Down with equality! Long live difference!”
She maimed one policeman, two soldiers, a café waiter, a lycée student, an ice cream man, three boys wearing soccer uniforms, a government official, a nurse, and a Santa Claus who passed by selling sugared peanuts. When Jaime arrived, the shooting had been going on for half an hour, and the victims were moaning where they fell in the street, trying to staunch the blood pouring out of thighs and calves. The Red Cross was slow in coming. Benjamín and Lola, on their knees amid the wounded, implored their mother to cease firing.
When the neighbors formed a chain to keep passersby from walking into danger, Teresa, with extraordinary marksmanship, began to kill pigeons, howling that those birds from hell were also in uniform. Then she shot at shadows because they were all the same color. When she decided that human bodies, because they were all the same — head, trunk, and extremities — were uniforms, chaos ensued. Benjamín and Lola fled, dodging bullets, and hid under a cart. Finally the police arrived along with an ambulance and a fire truck. They recommended waiting until she ran out of ammunition.
When they heard some clicks from her weapon, the ambulance personnel ran to pick up the wounded, and the firemen stretched out a ladder to block the window and keep the mad woman from diving down to the street. Had she really run out of bullets or was she crouched down with the reloaded rifle, waiting for someone to approach so she could open her vengeful fire again?
Jaime, without asking himself that question and forgetting his own pain, ran up the firemen’s ladder, slipped over the steps, and, making a huge leap, landed right in the dining room. On the table, with only her head protruding from the soapy, dark water, Teresa was lying naked in a metal tub. The rifle, empty now, was taking a bath with her. Her eyes were wide open, round, flashing, and the skin on her face was stretched, as if it were too small to hold in so much bitterness. Without recognizing her son, she spoke through him to address someone who was standing behind her back:
“Don’t ask yourself who you are, because you are no one. You’ve never existed. Like me. We are impostors in this world, which is not authentic, where there is nothing true and what is real is a mirage. Uniforms all over the place, copies of copies of copies, each suit, each body, each soul is a disguise. The surface is everywhere and the center nowhere. A piece of rock, a piece of flesh, a flood, a fire, a massacre, the void’s same old hypocritical game. We’ve been dead since the beginning of time. No one has ever been born. Strangle me, get me out of this lie!”
Teresa’s disillusionment was so great that Jaime stretched out his hands, wishing to obey her. She got on her knees, revealing her long, wide bosoms, large bananas that reached her navel.
“I’ve lost my strength. You, a good executioner, change the world. Make it finally be born.”
Jaime, retaining the compassion that was leading him to matricide, ran to open the door. The police came in scrambling like clowns from one place to another, shouting orders, pointing their carbines, shaking clubs, trembling as if the poor woman were a rabid gorilla. Behind them, whiter than a paraffin candle, came Benjamín and Lola. Teresa did not recognize them either. She sank completely into the water, trying to drown herself. The cops could find no other way to save her except tipping the tub over. The water splashed over the floor, giving off a pestilential stink. Aside from the grease and the soap, it contained leftover food, books dissolving into jelly, pieces of photographs, excrement, and little crystal balls.
They tied her hands, wrapped her in a blanket, and carried her away. As she passed by Jaime, she had a lucid instant: “My son, go see Recabarren. He was the only one who didn’t lie to us.”
Then she howled like an animal and began to fight against the uniformed ambulance people, foaming at the mouth. Her screeching could be heard until, finally, the ambulance that carried her to the insane asylum became a white dot far down Independence Avenue. Lola left, following the police and firemen without saying a word. Benjamín, holding back his sobs and his nausea, put on one of his mother’s aprons and began to wash the floor. He too said nothing. Jaime felt like a stranger. He knew his brother would see to it Teresa was moved to a decent clinic. After all, the old girl belonged to him. She was almost his wife. Offering him help would only arouse his jealousy. It seemed far better to lock oneself in a cheap hotel until this damned year ended.
He spent seven days in Room 13, without turning on the light, without talking to himself, without reading newspapers, stretched out like a corpse. When the sirens announced the New Year, he paid his bill with the last money he had and walked out to hug people in the street. The first person to fall into his arms was a muscular dark-skinned woman, beautiful and virile. Their embrace grew closer and closer, each one advancing with no modesty toward the intimacy of the other, charging like two warships, giving each other kisses like cannonades, and there, standing up, they fornicated for hours.
After ejaculating four times, Jaime asked what her name was. It turned out to be Isolda, the Lightning Bolt from Limache, a knife thrower. My father showed her the empty lining of his pockets and proposed that she take him on as her assistant. From her knapsack, the girl removed seven wide knives, placed Jaime next to a wooden entryway door, stepped back a few paces, and with glacial severity challenged him: “Will you take the dare?”
Jaime felt his knees grow weak, but his hunger advised him to risk his skin, despite the alcohol on the woman’s breath.
“I won’t even blink!”
She threw the knives at him. The first almost caught his ear. The second threateningly missed his ribs. The third caressed his calf. That took care of the left side. Three more tosses balanced the right.
“Spread your legs a bit. Still going to take the dare?”
Jaime separated his legs and said nothing, not out of bravery but because he’d lost his voice. The seventh knife struck so close to his perineum that if it weren’t that his scrotum had contracted like a cotton vest washed in hot water, she would have castrated him. The year 1920 offered him his first opportunity: he would be the target of dark-skinned Isolda in Toni Carrot’s circus.